Day of the Triffids minus the triffids

Rating: 4/10 (26 April 2004)

**Possible spoilers**
This movie would have been so much more fun with the triffids. After all, it preserves almost every other character, locale and plot twist from the John Wyndham novel (without attribution). Rage as a disease transmitted through blood and bodily fluids is the menace here, and an enthralling premise. But it disintegrates when our hero goes native to defend his womenfolk. What are we to think as our gentle, boyish leading man half-nakedly pounces on a would-be defiler and gouges his eyeballs with his bare thumbs? Perhaps that rage is part of the human condition, and that it can be put to productive use when administered by slender, handsome boys with an accute sense of justice and chastity. It's not a message that resonates with me. This is one of those movies where, halfway through, I start rooting for the monsters. The characters are cool kids wandering through an appocalypse like advertisements for the Trainspotting generation, totally unaware of their own glamour. They elicit about as much sympathy as Tanqueray models (with the exception of the father character, who should have been the one to survive, but who could not have been in this movie since he's over thirty). I will say that there are some lovely cinematic moments, particularly in the first half of the film and the sequences of a deserted London. There are moments where the narrative pauses so that the lens can make leisurely poetry. But ultimately Boyle and company have failed to take into account the lesson of previous apocalypse films, including one of the greatest, Dr. Strangelove: that you cannot tell such stories without a sense of humor. Even George Romero knew that.